“Say no to burqas”: geographies of nation and citizenship in Newtown

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which instances of everyday racism reproduce geographies of national belonging and exclusion in the city, focusing specifically on an activist campaign in Newtown, Australia, which called on the community to ‘Say no to burqas’. The focal point of this one-man campaign was a large, street facing mural, depicting a veiled woman, crossed out inside a red circle. The mural attracted much community opposition, and was defaced over sixty-four times. This thesis deconstructs the ways in which the mural campaign inscribed a particular national imaginary onto Newtown, constituted through the exclusion of the Muslim other; attending to the roots of this imaginary in racialised and gendered regimes of citizenship which privilege white, liberal civility. It goes on to show how the mural both reproduced, and was implicated in, the classed geographies of Australian multiculturalism, which figure the inner city as diverse and cosmopolitan, in opposition to the suburban as a site of ethnic criminality and multicultural failure. Finally, this thesis looks to various instances of organised opposition to the mural as examples of insurgent citizenship, capable of reimagining the relationship between place, nation and political community, in response to the ethical, political and practical task of living together in the multicultural city.